Using R as a GIS

Henry Partridge


MMUseR group meeting
16 November 2016

Why use R as GIS?

 

  • Open source: No cost
  • Performance: R is stable and blazingly fast
  • Reproducibility: code can be shared and the results repeated
  • Transparency: code can be checked forensically and any errors spotted
  • Automation: spatial analyses and data visualisations can be run and re-run with new and existing data sets
  • Integrated with ArcGIS: ArcGIS Bridge is an R package which allows ArcGIS and R to dynamically access data
  • and….

Support network

 

Example maps

Static maps

 

Source: James Cheshire (CASA, UCL), http://spatial.ly/2012/02/great-maps-ggplot2/

Interactive maps

Shiny apps

 

Source: Kyle Walker (Texas Christian University), https://walkerke.shinyapps.io/neighborhood_diversity/

Demo



The R code can be found in: github.com/rcatlord/tutorials